Monday, 29 July 2013

Hi Lovelies. It is Ifa with you today. Are you enjoying the summer holiday ? I am. I am also grateful for the brief respite in the evenings when rain comes. I definitely need cooling down.

I have been on two summer adventures already in this searing hot weather we are having. First, my order for sunny days whilst camping at Linnet Clough was delivered. We had a week of glorious sun shine. Not so great when you have a 15 km hike, especially climbing up to Jacobs Ladder!

I made a layout about that hike. I didn't enjoy it so I said so on my layout. Not all layouts have to paint a rosy picture! I also took some pictures of the boys ( Wolves, hello! ) who accompanied me on this journey cooling off in the water but I can't share those with you.

Soon after that trip, we went on a family holiday to the New Forest. We decided to take the ferry to Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight for a day. I managed to persuade my guys to pose for this self timed photo. Precious. My camera was perched on a stone wall and the next stop would have been the sea!

Have you noticed ? I have gone for yellow backgrounds this month. Perhaps this echoes the bright sunny days ? I have also used pretty papers and embellishments from Webster's Pages, Modern Romance and New Beginnings. I especially adore the mini bags and resin embellishments. Here they are close up.

What adventures are you up to this summer ? Whatever you get up to, have fun and don't forget the sun lotion. See you at the end of the holidays.

Friday, 26 July 2013

I like to get the most out of any crafting 'tools' I purchase, so look for as many different uses for them as I can. So instead of just using the template for misting or inking through, I decided to trace and cut through it and use both the positive and negative cuts.

For my first layout I drew through the template on the reverse of the paper I wanted to use and cut out the pieces from two strips of the pattern, then placed the chevron pattern across the center of my page.

For my next page I used the whole template, and secured it with a piece of tape onto a 6"x 12" piece of cardstock. I then cut the pieces out carefully with a craft knife, and backed it with patterned paper.

I hope I have inspired you the look at other ways to use your templates.

Saturday, 20 July 2013

My turn on the blog and this month I have been playing with Liquid Pearls. I am a huge fan of liquid pearls for adding accents to my layouts but I only tend to do the same thing with them each time.. and that is to add dots to embellish as I have done on this layout below.

Here I have added pearls to create a border around my photograph.

I thought I would like to challenge myself to use them for something different. I have done most of the common thing like adding them to the center of flowers and adding them to alphas to create dimension etc..

So here is what I came up with..A Smudge. Yep very technical not but, I am loving the effect the smudge has created on my page as not only does it have a lovely pearly shine but it also adds texture.

Monday, 15 July 2013

Hi all, Jen N here today. I want to share with you a technique I go to when I feel the need to use up some supplies! I made this page to document our feelings about finding out the sex of our baby before he or she arrives - we like a surprise!

The Simple Stories I Heart Summer range was the perfect fun mix of bright colours for a gender neutral page. Even when baby arrives, he or she will definitely be dressed in rainbow brights so I liked that using these colours on a pregnancy page will bring some continuity.

There are certain supplies that I seem to collect but rarely use, and buttons and brads are two of those. I recently had a clear out and sold a lot of my vast collection, but I still have a substantial amount! Here's my button storage jar, and I have another for brads although that's not quite as full.

I wanted to create a big heart embellishment in the centre of the page using up lots of buttons and brads in the process.The first step was to lay out the basic elements of the page - I used the gorgeous diagonal stripe for my background (I gutted the centre because it's so pretty!) and laid a 10x10" square of a plain-ish design on top. I then added my photo, a strip of the teal boardwalk design, a 4x6 card from the cut apart elements sheet and a die cut piece from the SN@P cards pack.

I drew a heart onto some scrap card and cut it out placing it roughly in the centre of my page, overlapping all the other elements. In this case I drew around a small heart shaped bowl I have on my desk for storage, but you could draw around anything, or hand draw, or even print off a shape from the computer and use that as a template. You can see that I decided my initial drawing was a bit small, so I just cut a bit away from the line. One of the rouonded edges didn't go far enouh out, but it doesn't matter - this piece will be covered up anyway!

The next step is to pick out a few buttons to get started with. I poured some of the contents of my jar onto a tray and sifted through to find buttons that were a good colour match for the papers. I pulled out a selection to get started with. I won't use them all, and I may have to go back to find others that are a better size for certain places, but it's a good starting point.

I then start filling in the shape. I lay buttons along the edge of the shape first, mixing up the sizes and colours, and then fill in the middle. You will definitely have a lot of gaps and that's fine. This technique is all about building up gradually. Just try and fill as much of the shape as you can. For this stage I do lay them all out before sticking anything down, as I want to make sure that I fill the shape evenly and don't put too many of the same colour together. Then I stick everything down with wet glue and leave it to dry thoroughly.

This is your base layer complete. Next up are the brads. Again I sifted through the contents of the jar and pulled out a selection onto my desk. I also used several from the Simple Stories brad pack to bring the whole page together - using brads from the coordinating collections means I know I'll have some repeated elements and colours that exactly match my papers. It just gives a nice cohesive look to the page, but certainly isn't essential, and isn't strictly stash busting!

Start filling in the gaps in your shape with brads - use a few bigger ones first to cover some of the larger spaces, and then fill in smaller gaps with smaller brads. It's a very simple process really. There's no need to pre-plan this part, just get your paper piercer and one at a time add the brads.

You'll end up with something like this. If you look closely you can still see a few gaps, a few tiny sneaks of that kraft cardstock shape especially around the edges. That's the trouble with using circular embellishments to cover a straight line! To cover those final bits I add a few tiny gemstones, which give a lovely subtle sparkle too.

It's done! The finished article will be pretty heavy, so I reinforce the layout by attaching the whole page securely onto a piece of plain cardstock for support.

A title, some journalling and a couple of stickers are all that's needed to complete the page.

Why not have a look at the selection of buttons and brads available in the shop, or turn to your own stash and give it a try!

Monday, 8 July 2013

At last we have some lovely weather! I have to admit it is a little too hot for me, but still it is long over due!

I have been feeling summery this last few weeks with Simple Stories I Heart Summer. I ordered a pack of the album pages. Each page is 6"x8" and coordinates with the patterned papers in the range. Four of the pages are die cut - these are the ones I was attracted to most. I decided to use them on my usual A4 size pages. I began with this one:

I teamed it with some of the 6x6 papers and some of the Expressions Stickers. I also used a few of the Jillybean corrugated card people that I showed you a couple of months ago. I was running out of boys so I decided to "operate" on a girl like this:

I repeated the cut on the other side and hey presto! I now have more boys in my pack than girls!

At this point I decided to photograph what else was in the packet for you to get a better look at.

I chose to use the cloud die cut page next. I added a few veneer hearts for some added texture.

Next I used the gorgeous heart die cut page, BUT I was sneaky. I gutted most of it so I could use it on more pages. the strips of hearts you can see are all of that page that I used here. I just tucked the edges behind the 6x6 patterned paper a mm or so.

The photograph is of a cute card my 6 year old made for me.

I used another strip of those lovely die cut hearts on this page along with the "sunshine & laughter" bunting page. The alpha stickers are from the Stickers Expression sheet.

Another die cut heart found it's way onto this page. The strip of hearts was cut from the newspaper print page as was the word "fun"

Well folks, Blogger is being a pain in the craft knife tonight! I'm going to have to leave it there as it is refusing to let me edit anything I have already written! I have one more page to share but as I used the July Sketch Challenge I'll save it until the next post. Come back in a few days to see the challenge. TTFN

Thank you for all your lovely entries to our June sketch challenge. We really enjoy seeing what you make and reading the stories behind your pages.

There can only be one winner though, and this month our sketch challenge winner is Claire with her gorgeous page about daily life. We loved the mixture of patterns chosen, and the way the sketch was adapted for portrait photos.

Thursday, 4 July 2013

Hello ladies,
Tracie here, and this month I have been playing with those cute little bags that have been finding their way into the different ranges recently.

On my first layout I had rather a lot of journalling, so I added it to tags which I popped into the bags, that way I could write as much as I wanted but still keep a fairly simple feel to the overall layout;
cos let's face it when you find a photo of your grandson that's as cute as this one, you really don't want to have too many distractions on the page!!

I recently came across these photos of me and my siblings with my lovely nan.

I don't know if you're the same as me but I think that finding old photos that you'd forgotten about or didn't even know existed is on a par with winning the lottery!
I scanned these photo booth images to make them slightly bigger (and tidy them up a little as they had quite a bit of damage) before adding them to my layout.

Of course, along with my little bag I had to add some of my trusty wood veneer shapes and a little washi for good measure!

I wanted to try something a little different with the bags and decided to make a birthday card, I rarely make cards but they are an excellent way to use up all those scraps!

so that's all from me for this month, enjoy what's left of the sunshine!

Tuesday, 2 July 2013

Hello all, it's Louise here with some LOs created using the Basic Grey Hipster range, which can be seen here. I loved the colours and the patterns, and fell in love with the stamps as soon as I saw them.
The first LO was of a photo of Oliver taken in April. He's getting so grown up and has started to take an interest in how he looks, what style his hair is in and what he smells like... but it's not because he likes a particular girl in his class... lol!

I decided to go back to 12x12 for this months blog work. And although it was a little daunting at first, I actually really enjoyed working big again, so who knows... I may decide to fill some of those half filled albums I've got stored away!
I used a sheet of the dark kraft for my background and splattered some blue mist on it. The LO was kept very simple with layering of patterned papers, stamped images and a couple of the tickets from the collection. I stamped using white ink directly onto the LO, and like the grungy feel where some of the letters didn't print perfectly.

My second LO is of a fun day spent at Rhyl with friends. I had lots of photos I wanted to use of the boys playing cricket, so I printed them off as 2.5x3.5 so I could use more of them.

I used white card for my base and used A Crafter's Workshop mask and beach themed stamps with ink pads to create a subtle background.

The stamped FUN was made into a folded banner so that it jumped out from the page.

My last LO is one devoted to Harry Bear. He can be such a sulky child, and will often refuse to have his photo taken. On a winter trip to one of our favourite parks he obliged and really played up to the camera. I love these photo of him and these papers were just perfect to use. I used a sheet of red card to create a narrow border to tie in with the red of H's coat.

The printed stamps had this very cute 'H is for' which was made for a LO about Harry. I layered it with the cut away strips from the papers, and a couple of details cut from one of the papers.

I used a number of random stamps from my collection with these stamps from the Hipster collection, to fill in areas of white space.

I cut strips from the patterned papers and created 3 chevron blocks to mat my photos. This proved a great way to use loads of the patterns without being too overpowering.

If you have used the Hipster range, leave us a link to your blog/gallery so I can stop by and have a look.

Remember to come back every couple of days to see what the rest of the team have been up to.